Thank you Mr.Chairman.

Good morning ladies and gentleman.

My name is Masayoshi ITO of Mitsubishi Motors Corporation.

Today I would like to make a presentation titled "Development of adaptive cruise control," our product name is "Preview Distance Control."

This shows today's contents.

Research & Development for Advanced Vehicle Control System, "AVCS".

Preview Distance Control

Driver's Attention Monitor

and finally Mitsubishi's future plan

This slide shows our research & development activities for Advanced Vehicle Control System. Our main advanced research involves ASV and AHS projects. As a result of this research, we have been introducing a number of Advanced Vehicle Control Systems into the market as shown in this figure. Control systems are divided into four categories, Chassis control system, Transmission control system, Longitudinal control system, and Lateral control system. We have been developing Advanced Vehicle Control Systems in the four categories.

Our aim of AVCS is to provide the driver easier and safer driving.

Now, I would like to introduce these Adaptive Cruise Control systems and this Attention monitor.

Preview Distance Control is the product mane for Mitsubishi's ACC.

This configuration is the latest system installed in our Diamante with 3 liter Gasoline Direct Injection engine. Laser radar is the main sensor which detects the headway distance. Other sensors such as speed sensor, steering angle sensor, and throttle position sensor are used to detect the vehicle state. The electronic control unit processes information from these sensors, and it controls the throttle and the automatic transmission to maintain the headway distance. We selected the 1.8 second-headway in order to provide a safety time margin for the driver in an emergency.

This slide shows the front view and the cross section of the scanning laser radar sensor unit.

The package is very small.

The dimensions are 100 millimeters in width, 52 millimeters in height, and 70 millimeters in depth.

This slide shows the specifications of the scanning laser radar.

Laser wave length is 850 nano-meters. Maximum range is over 100 meters.

Azimuth view angle is 12 degrees and vertical view angle is 4 degrees.

Scanning frequency is 10 Hz.

You can see this sensor at the AHSRA's booth in the exhibition area. Please drop in at the AHSRA's booth after this discussion!

This slide shows the target vehicle recognition algorithm.

For proper vehicle control, the nearest vehicle in the same lane must be recognized as the target vehicle.

In order to achieve this goal, we adopted the scanning laser radar for this system.

At first, system detects forward objects and selects running vehicles from all the detected objects. Next, system estimates the road curvature from reflected lights of road side delineators. Finally system distinguishes the target vehicle from other vehicles in adjacent lanes.

This slide shows the control switch for Preview Distance Control.

Please notice that control switch for Preview Distance Control is same as conventional cruise control.

I think, it's very important to provide drivers with an easy-to-understand human-machine interface.

This shows the display on the dashboard, very good place for the driver to see.

In the display there appear Warning, Operation mode, Headway distance, and Set speed.

This denotes "Short headway warning."

This is the target vehicle. When it is displayed in white, it means "lock on."

And you can see "headway distance" is 30 meters and "set speed" is 100 kilometers per hour.

This slide shows customer survey results. Drivers who drove the early model PDC Diamantes with 2-second headway were surveyed. The average trip of these customers was 6,800 kilometers.

The first question was, "On which roads have you used the system?" The result shows that 60 percent customers have used the system also on city roads. The second question was, "Is the headway distance of this system suitable for you?" 70 percent of the drivers were comfortable with the headway distance of 2 seconds. We have not done tests or survey on European drivers. But Europeans may prefer a shorter headway distance.

Next I'd like to talk about the headway of PDC.

This graph shows the headway distribution on a typical Japanese expressway.

The first generation of our PDC maintains a 2 second-headway.

You can see that 1.5 second-headway is observed most frequently in PDC OFF driving.

In the last slide I mentioned that 2 second-headway was accepted by customers. But as you can see this figure, from the view point of traffic efficiency, 1.5 second-headway is desirable rather than 2 second-headway.

One solution to the problem is to apply automatic braking.

The upper part of the slide shows the current system without braking. The headway is 1.8 or 2 seconds.

The lower part shows the future system we're developing with braking.

Although the headway is reduced to 1.5 seconds, the automatic braking compensates for the same safety time margin.

This type of step by step approach to introducing new systems might be good, because a sudden change of system function would confuse drivers.

Mitsubishi also introduced "Preview Distance Control" on heavy duty trucks last May.

This slide shows the system configuration.

The system monitors the target vehicle using laser radar in association with a CCD camera.

The system adjusts the engine output by an engine governor and auxiliary brakes to control the headway distance depending on the subject vehicle's speed.

Next, I would like to introduce Mitsubishi Driver's Attention Monitoring System, MDAS, another AVCS product for big trucks.

This illustrates the system outline.

The CCD camera detects vehicle meandering relative to lane markings. Other minor sensors detect deterioration of driver's operation.

The system indicates the driver's alertness level and issues lane departure alarm.

This slide shows the cockpit layout of the system.

The system is composed of a CCD camera, other sensors, an electronic control unit, a speaker and a graphic display on the instrument panel.

This slide shows alertness estimation.

At first three factors are pre-processed: they are the vehicle's meandering rate, the monotony value of driver operation, and the amount of corrective steering.

Then the system utilizes fuzzy reasoning to estimate driver alertness.

Finally, the estimated alertness transition level is indicated to the driver with graph. A lane departure alarm is activated when the driver's alertness decreases into these two lower levels.

Finally, I'll mention our future plan for AVCS. This figure shows various kinds of Advanced Vehicle Control Systems plotted from the viewpoints of driver fatigue reduction and active safety. The systems in the lower-left have been introduced into the market already. The opposite area might be the new frontier. To realize systems in this area, much more intensive research might be required. The key technologies are; how to get the high-quality information about traffic environment, and how to cooperate well with the driver. We hope that a fully-automated driving system will be realized at the early stage of the coming century.

Thank you very much for your attention.